


The Stairs That Lead to the October Country

by clockheartedcrocodile



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Halloween, Horror Elements, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Major Character Injury, Off-Screen Murder, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 11:43:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21035702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockheartedcrocodile/pseuds/clockheartedcrocodile
Summary: Some time ago, in the days of your grandmother’s grandmother, there lived two men of great intelligence and extraordinary technical ability. Their names were Dr. Geiszler and Dr. Gottlieb.





	The Stairs That Lead to the October Country

Some time ago, in the days of your grandmother’s grandmother, there lived two men of great intelligence and extraordinary technical ability. Their names were Dr. Geiszler and Dr. Gottlieb.

Gottlieb did not believe in the October Country. If pressed, he might have said that all men carry that hallowed place within themselves- that we all have our October Countries. But he was a man of science, and although he had a passing interest in the theoretical and the intangible, this interest did not extend so far as the October Country’s ashen gates.

Geiszler was a doctor, of the kind that performs surgeries on animals, and he believed. Indeed, he had a positive mania for the October Country, not unlike the mania that a certain Mr. Toad had for motorcars- if you’ll recall your summer reading.

Geiszler believed that the human mind was the single most remarkable feat of engineering the universe had yet produced, and that only through opening the mind could one open the gates of the October Country. Thus he was often found consulting spirit mediums and holding séances, and he had grown quite a reputation as a kind of pseudoscientific busybody.

Gottlieb lived uptown, Geiszler lived downtown, and though they had never met one another face to face, they were the dearest of friends. Then came the war.

The war left Gottlieb without the full use of his left leg, and Geiszler with an intermittent tremor in both hands. There were some days when he could not even hold a lancet. His medical practice began to decline.

Both men soon found themselves in abject misery. Geiszler had taken to laudanum, and Gottlieb, cigarettes. Finally they agreed to arrange a holiday- one that would allow them to work closely with one another out in the countryside. There they would be far from the noise and nightmares of the city, where every closing window was a gunshot, and every creak of a stair was an enemy boot.

This holiday would take them through the end of summer and into late autumn. All that remained was to find a suitable host. To be safe, they wrote to potential candidates under the names “Dr. Harper” and “Dr. Jorden,” and they were pleased with many of the replies they received.

Ultimately, it was Geiszler who made the final decision.

_His name is Mr. Hansen,_ he wrote in his final letter. _He keeps a lighthouse._

Mr. Hansen’s given name was Hercules, and he lived on the- yes, I suppose he did look rather like Hercules, if Hercules had been allowed to grow old- he lived on the outskirts of a shabby coastal town up north, in a cottage by the base of a lighthouse. He had a son in town with whom he did not get along. He lived alone.

It was not uncommon for Hansen to let the cottage out to lodgers. On this particular occasion however, Doctors “Harper” and “Jorden” were insistent. They needed more room for their work, they said, and Hansen begrudgingly made allowances for them to stay in the lighthouse instead. He did not know or care what work they were doing. As long as he was being paid handsomely for it, he would sleep in the cottage.

Gottlieb, who found staircases difficult on the best of days, took the first floor, and Geiszler, the second. They arrived not a week after their final letter to Hansen, in two separate cabs, each bringing with them an extensive selection of luggage. The porters, with Mr. Hansen’s help, carried the baggage indoors.

Gottlieb and Geiszler remained outside. They looked up at the lighthouse and tried very hard not to look at each other.

Until this moment, each had seen the other only in blurry, black-and-white photographs in the papers. In person, each was astonished by what they saw. Geiszler was shorter than he looked in print, and Gottlieb, taller. Geiszler in particular found himself taken aback by Gottlieb’s limp, which was rather more pronounced than Gottlieb had pretended it was in his letters. Gottlieb, who had been led to believe that Geiszler was a careless, libertine sort of man, was surprised to see him dressed as stiffly as a schoolteacher, with his shirt buttoned to the throat and his coat buttoned over that.

“Well,” said Gottlieb. “Here we are.”

“Yes,” said Geiszler. “Here we are.”

They laughed the nervous laughs of men poised on a precipice, preparing for the long plunge. Then they went inside, and turned on the lamp.

The lighthouse interior smelled vaguely of gull droppings. Gottlieb hung his hat and coat on a peg by the door and looked around. The ground floor served as kitchen, dining room, parlor, and now guest room, all in one. It was not cramped- there was a great deal of table space, ideal for Gottlieb’s purposes- and he found the idea of sleeping where he worked more of a convenience than an annoyance.

There was also a staircase. It spiraled up and up the curved walls until it reached the second floor and, presumably, the third. It was cold and hard and narrow, and the wood had warped in the middle from the passage of two centuries of footfalls. Geiszler, madman that he was, took the steps two at a time, leaving Gottlieb to unpack.

There was one slim window overlooking the sea, and Gottlieb placed his cot beneath it. He hung curtains around the bed to allow for a little privacy, and with that deed done, he began to unpack his equipment.

He worked steadily through the afternoon as the porters tramped up and down the stairs, carrying an endless procession of oddly-shaped crates and boxes up to Geiszler’s room. Geiszler himself carried smaller articles- microscopes, a first aid kit, and so on- and once, a steamer trunk, awkwardly large but apparently light enough to carry.

The porters did not leave until early evening. Hansen made tea after they were gone- the stove was temperamental, he said, but there was a trick to it- and the three of them sat around the kitchen table and talked late into the night.

“You should’ve taken the second floor,” said Geiszler, in an airy way that made Gottlieb feel both annoyed and hysterically amused. “The view looks different up there.”

“I’m quite content where I am,” said Gottlieb. He tapped the floor with his cane for emphasis.

Geiszler gestured from Gottlieb to Hansen. “There lies the difference between us, Mr. Hansen. I’m never content where I am.”

One of the first and worst inconveniences they encountered during their stay was the lavatory- there was only one, and it was in Hansen’s cottage. Hansen gave each of them a key and assured them that they were welcome to its use at any time, but this did not make the trudge any easier. Geiszler, much to Gottlieb’s dismay, felt the need to use the lavatory at all sorts of odd nighttime hours. He did not tread lightly on the stairs.

Meanwhile, long-term cohabitation gave rise to a thousand little grievances with each other’s characters. Geiszler was irrational, and irritable, and had a tendency to trap people in conversations from which they could not escape. He was by turns as social as a butterfly and as solitary as an oyster, and expected his boundaries attended to while stomping all over those of other people. Moreover, he had been a naval surgeon, and had picked up a certain coarseness of speech that annoyed Gottlieb almost as much as it amused Hansen.

Gottlieb, meanwhile, was prone to fits of violent temper. These outbursts had cost him a good marriage to an excellent woman. He was also inclined to periods of prolonged insomnia, during which he smoked at all hours of the night and would not speak to anyone for any reason. He complained daily of the weather, saying it made his joints act up. He rarely smiled.

Hansen was gruff, and often morose. He was in and out of the lighthouse at all hours of the day, attending to the many little chores and duties that keep a lighthouse running. First he would scrape his boots on the mat, hang up his coat, and ascend the staircase to the upper floors. He would walk back down again several hours later, collect his hat and coat, and leave. He would do all this without so much as nodding in Gottlieb’s direction.

Gottlieb did not notice- he was too deeply invested in his work. It had become clear to him very quickly that where he did _work,_ Geiszler did _experiments._ What was it Gottlieb did, you ask? Well, it was all very technical, but suffice to say it had something to do with abstract mathematics.

Gottlieb was not a patient man, and this little country holiday was beginning to wear on him. He hated that the sky was starless even at night. He hated the walk to the lavatory, and his finicky equations, and the cold, gray weather that made his leg ache like the devil. He hated the sea.

Most of all, he hated that he was beginning to fall in love with Dr. Geiszler.

I know what you’re thinking, little one. How could he have loved Geiszler, if he found him so troublesome? Well, between you and me, I don’t think he found Geiszler half so troublesome as he thought he did. In fact, I think he liked him very much. Yes, even when Geiszler was behaving oddly. Maybe especially then.

One morning, when the weather was particularly gloomy and Gottlieb’s mood was particularly dire, Geiszler returned from his morning walk and informed him that he’d found something.

Gottlieb, who had been stirring a chipped mug of tea at the time, tapped the spoon lightly against the ceramic. “I beg your pardon?”

“I found something,” Geiszler repeated. He did not remove his hat and coat. “It’s _disgusting_. Do you want to see it?”

“Why on earth would I do something like that?”

Geiszler stared at him. Drops of drying seawater speckled his glasses. “Well, are you coming or aren’t you?”

There had never been any question of that. The opportunity to enjoy Geiszler’s company on the beach was too tempting to refuse, and Gottlieb suspected that Geiszler knew that.

They left together, Gottlieb with his coat buttoned to the throat, Geiszler with his hat pulled low over his eyes. The air was damp outside. The clouds congealed in the sky like spoiled milk, and the wind whipped the long grass against Gottlieb’s ankles as they approached the edge of the cliff.

The lighthouse stood on a precipice overlooking the shore, with a steep, rocky path sloping down to the beach below. Geiszler did not go on ahead, but kept pace with Gottlieb as he picked his careful way down the incline. The sand below was cold and sticky, and they walked westward for a time, elbow to elbow.

“I don’t recognize it,” Geiszler was saying. He had not stopped talking since they left the lighthouse. “That’s concerning enough, but what’s worse is that nothing washed up with it. No detritus, no foam, no mysterious fluids.”

“And you’re quite sure it’s dead?”

“You wouldn’t ask me that if you’d seen the thing.”

The wind changed and Gottlieb choked on the air, covering his mouth with his wrist as an appalling stench wafted down the beach to meet them. Geiszler wordlessly offered him a handkerchief and Gottlieb accepted it gratefully, covering his mouth and nose. His eyes were beginning to water.

It was a stench like copper and salt and decay, and it grew stronger as they approached the thing Geiszler had found. It was fat and gray and swollen with putrefaction. At a distance, Gottlieb would’ve called it a sea lion, but as they drew closer he realized he had no idea what it was at all. It looked like a messy knot of organic tissue. Slick, gaping orifices gleamed at him from under flaps of rotting muscle. A row of pale suckers curled across one side, like buttons on an officer’s uniform. The stench was intolerable.

Geiszler looked down at it, hands in his pockets. He reached out to prod the bloated skin with one foot and Gottlieb grabbed his arm, pulled him back. “For god’s sake, man,” he mumbled into the handkerchief, “don’t _touch_ it.”

“Whatever it is, it’s definitely dead,” said Geiszler. He withdrew his hands from his pockets, and with them, a pair of rubber gloves. He slipped them on and squatted in the sand. “I’m thinking of bringing it back to the house. I’d like to dissect it.”

Gottlieb leaned closer, still breathing through the handkerchief. “Absolutely impossible. See how it’s bloated? Any attempt to move it will cause the- the _belly_ to split and all the gas will-”

“I know that,” Geiszler snapped. “Don’t you think I know that?”

Gottlieb grimaced. He had to concede that Geiszler was the surgeon, and he, the mathematician. Nonetheless, the idea of bringing the thing back to the house was appalling, and he told Geiszler so.

“You’re not even a little bit curious?” said Geiszler. He pressed one gloved finger into a soft, spongey bit of tissue. A thin line of discharge leaked out onto the sand. “I mean, this thing . . . I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“I think it’s horrible,” said Gottlieb, “and I think you should leave it well enough alone. I don’t fancy the thought of you dragging that carcass through Mr. Hansen’s kitchenette.”

Geiszler had the decency to look embarrassed. He straightened up and began to remove his gloves. “I don’t pester you about your experiments.”

“You do nothing but,” Gottlieb snapped. “And at any rate, _my_ work doesn’t give off such an appalling stench.”

He could tell by the set of Geiszler’s jaw that Geiszler’s teeth were clenched. Geiszler let out a sharp exhale through his nose and turned his back on the corpse, beginning to walk back up the beach. Gottlieb, grateful, followed him.

“I’ll have Mr. Hansen help me drag it back to the house,” he said. “I’ll take it upstairs- you won’t even have to look at it.”

“You’re like a child poking at a dead animal on the side of the road,” Gottlieb muttered, but he let the matter drop.

Sure enough, Hansen agreed to help. Geiszler helped him drag it back to the lighthouse in a burlap sack, and to heft the thing up the stairs one step at a time. Gottlieb could hear the muffled cursing for a long time after they’d passed out of view.

Gottlieb liked to think of the staircase as a line drawn down the middle of their lives- Geiszler lived upstairs, Gottlieb lived downstairs, and no more was said about it. Geiszler, though, was all too happy to ignore that line. He often came downstairs to loiter by the icebox, drinking cold milk straight from the bottle and asking Gottlieb endless questions about advanced mathematics. He was a wonderful annoyance.

Sometimes Hansen would join them for their icebox conversations. Gottlieb was less than thrilled by this- Hansen had no interest in the minutia of abstract scientific theory, and besides, Gottlieb preferred to have Geiszler’s attention to himself- but Hansen made up for it by bringing the good liquor from the cottage.

On one such occasion, when it was late and they’d fallen deep into their cups, Hansen revealed that he’d never been to the city. He wanted to go very badly, and he wanted to bring his son with him. Charles Hansen wanted nothing to do with him, as far as he knew, but they spoke cordially enough when they crossed paths in town. They had even enjoyed full conversations in recent days.

Gottlieb, who had a poor relationship with his father, sympathized with this mysterious Charles. If he didn’t get along with his father, there was doubtless a reason for it.

The nights grew longer and the weather grew colder. Gottlieb didn’t know what Geiszler was working on upstairs, and no matter how he needled him, Geiszler didn’t tell.

His trips to the icebox grew more and more infrequent, and Gottlieb, bored with his own projects, started going outside to smoke and look out over the sea. He wondered if Geiszler was making use of that rotten thing he’d found on the beach. Perhaps he’d found out what it was by now.

Geiszler, meanwhile, had been learning about the lighthouse business. Gottlieb figured that out after yet another day of watching Hansen march wearily upstairs, only to come down again several hours later and leave without a word. The next time Gottlieb saw Geiszler, he would inevitably be regaled with some new, obscure detail about lighthouse keeping.

“Did you know,” Geiszler once said, as they were drinking together late one night, “that every lighthouse is unique?”

“Hmm,” said Gottlieb, who was thinking about math.

Geiszler took another swig of liquor. “Each shines their own particular sequence of lights. This sequence is a a constant- it never varies. That’s how foreign vessels know which shore they’re approaching. They can tell by the lights.”

“Hansen tells you everything about the lighthouse, does he?” Gottlieb said, just as a sharp pounding on the front door interrupted his thoughts. Geiszler stood to answer it, swaying slightly. They had both been drinking steadily for the past hour.

Hansen was standing on the doorstep, dripping with rain. He brushed past Geiszler and slapped a wet newspaper on the table in front of Gottlieb.

“You’re krauts, aren’t you,” he said.

Geiszler’s breathing changed.

Gottlieb pushed his chair back from the table and looked Hansen in the eye. “We fought on your side, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Hansen stabbed a finger at the paper. “Geiszler,” he said, “and Gottlieb. Those are kraut names.”

“We were born in this place. We were fully prepared to die defending it.”

Gottlieb heard the floorboards creak as Geiszler came to stand behind his chair. It was oddly comforting, having that man at his back, even though logically Gottlieb knew there was nothing to worry about. They were well respected in their fields. There was no question of where their loyalties lay.

In the city, perhaps. But out here . . .

Hansen’s eyes, narrowed in suspicion, eventually softened. His shoulders slumped. He looked drained.

“Listen,” he said. “You seem like decent people, and I’m inclined to let you stay on. I’ll be sending some letters, though. Checking up on you. Making sure you are who are who the papers say you are,” Hansen swept the newspaper off the table. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, not even some kind of scandal, then I see no reason why you gave me those fake names.”

_No reason, he says,_ Gottlieb thought bitterly. _This was the reason_.

Geiszler, who had remained silent through the whole encounter, waited until Hansen had shut the door on his way out before letting out a strangled oath. _“Bastard,”_ he snarled. “How_ generous_ of him to continue to house us. How _kind_.”

Gottlieb pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. “We did lie to him,” he muttered. “There is that.”

“He had no right to talk to you that way,” Geiszler snapped. “What has he ever done? Who is he compared to you or I? We, we fight, we nearly die, and for what? _You’re krauts, aren’t you? _That’s what we get. That, and this.”

He held up one trembling hand for Gottlieb’s inspection, and laughed. It was a sharp, bitter bark of a laugh that made something twist in Gottlieb’s heart.

That night, Gottlieb had a nightmare.

He dreamt of the suffocating pressure of ten thousand tons of water. He dreamt of the blackness at the bottom of the ocean trenches, and the blackness at the bottom of the trenches in the war. He dreamt of a cold, white light, blinking in sequence across a sunless sea.

He woke with his mouth full of saltwater. Gottlieb coughed it up over the edge of the bed and lay still, breathing heavily and staring into the dark.

This happened again the following night. And the next night. And the next.

Geiszler and Hansen continued to talk, despite their now obvious distaste for each other. Gottlieb often observed them sitting side by side on the steps leading up to the second floor. They would talk for hours about the finer points of lighthouse keeping.

During these conversations, Gottlieb could inevitably be found at the kitchen table, pretending to work on his equations. The more Hansen talked to Geiszler, the more he got on Gottlieb’s nerves- wasting Geiszler’s time was, to Gottlieb, a greater crime than any accusation Hansen might have leveled against them. He liked the man less and less with every passing day.

Despite his continuing desire to study the lighthouse, Geiszler had not forgotten the incident with the newspaper. Gottlieb heard him arguing with Hansen upstairs, their voices always muffled by the floorboards or the rough weather outside. Several days passed when Gottlieb failed to see Geiszler at all- only heard him shouting, or being shouted at.

Geiszler’s mood declined with the weather and Gottlieb’s wasn’t much better. He rarely ventured outside, not even to smoke. At times he would catch himself watching the ocean through the window. The water grew blacker as September leaned into October.

Gottlieb liked to believe that he was too scientifically-minded for thoughts of the supernatural and macabre. Nonetheless, his inclination towards the fanciful changed with the seasons. Much like yours and mine.

He did not like to look at the water too long. It seemed to him that if he tilted his head the right way, and narrowed his eyes just so, he could see shadows moving in the hidden depths.

One night, the nightmare changed.

Again the suffocating water. Again the impenetrable darkness. Again the cold, white light that pierced Gottlieb’s eyes like a lancet.

This time, he heard something.

It was a dull and distant thump. It had the warbling quality of a sound heard very deep underwater. It was followed by another, this one louder, closer. Then another, and another. At least a dozen.

In these dreams, Gottlieb felt weightless- the only sense he had of his own body was the water pressure constricting him on all sides. He could’t feel his legs. He couldn’t move.

The noise grew louder, and louder, until he heard a crack.

Gottlieb didn’t wake up.

Geiszler came downstairs for breakfast the next morning. He sat slumped at the kitchen table, not talking.

Gottlieb managed to scrape together a fry-up from the contents of the icebox and served it with tea, which Geiszler didn’t drink. Gottlieb pulled out the chair across from him and groaned when he sat down. He felt as exhausted as Geiszler looked.

“Is Mr. Hansen coming in today?” he asked, hoping to engage Geiszler in conversation with as little mental effort as possible.

Geiszler’s fork clinked against his plate. His hands were shaking again. He threw the fork down like it had wronged him. “No,” he said loudly. “He’s not.”

Gottlieb frowned. “That seems odd.”

“Odd,” said Geiszler. “Right.”

They picked at their eggs and toast in silence, and watched the steam curl up from their tea.

“Actually,” said Geiszler, “he told me he’s not going to be back for a few days. He got to talking with Charles and apparently they’ve worked something out. He says they’re taking that holiday in the city just like he’s always wanted, and he’s not sure when they’ll be back.”

Gottlieb blinked in surprise. “Goodness,” he said. “How sudden.”

Geiszler made a little hissing sound between his teeth. “Sudden is one word for it,” he said. “I wish he’d given me more notice. I still have questions about the lighthouse.”

Gottlieb nodded distantly, his mind still processing the news. He found it difficult to imagine the kind of talk that might repair years of bitterness between father and son. He tried to picture his own father taking him on holiday, and couldn’t hold back an amused snort at the image. “I suppose he thinks he can bunk off to the city and leave us to clean up the shipwrecks, then?”

“He told me to look after it.”

Gottlieb laughed. “You? A lighthouse keeper? Next I suppose you’ll be growing a beard and singing songs about broken men on Halifax piers.”

Geiszler’s eye twitched, much to Gottlieb’s satisfaction. “Lighthouse keeping isn’t so difficult. He was a more or less a glorified janitor- I’m sure I’ll be able to pick up where he left off. God,” he muttered, pushing his plate away from him. “This tastes like ash.”

“My wife did the cooking,” Gottlieb admitted. “I haven’t the talent for it.”

“No, you don’t,” said Geiszler. He leaned back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb. After a moment, he made that little hissing sound again and stood up. “I’m going upstairs,” he said, and then, “I meant what I said, you know.”

“What’s that, then?”

“You should’ve taken the second floor,” said Geiszler. Then, in a voice almost hysterical with sarcasm, he added, “It all looks different up there.”

Gottlieb’s hand was tight on the handle of his mug but he set it down soundlessly. He felt his old friend Anger twist like a serpent in his belly but he didn’t listen to it. That screaming demon inside him had cost him a marriage. Gottlieb was determined not to let it cost him the man upstairs too.

He spent too long thinking of witty retorts and by the time he’d found the perfect one, Geiszler was already halfway up the stairs. He climbed with his head ducked down, like a man walking into the rain.

When Gottlieb was a boy, he read a book about elephants.

In it, a baby elephant was chained to a tree. The elephant’s trainer came to the tree every day, and tugged on that chain, and the elephant knew that it could not possibly hope to break free. As the years wore on, and the elephant grew, the trainer replaced the chain with thick, knotted ropes. Then he used thin ropes. Then wire.

At the end of it all, the elephant- big now, and unfathomably strong- was tied to the tree by a single silk thread. But the memory of the chain held the elephant captive. It did not even try to escape.

Gottlieb wondered, as he composed his equations and waited for Geiszler to come downstairs, if the lines drawn between them were just that. Silk thread, easily broken. You stay upstairs, Dr. Geiszler, and I shall stay downstairs. Let us write letters if we absolutely must, but never the twain shall meet. My leg, you see. My leg, my leg, my leg.

The staircase had seemed like a convenient way to keep the man both close and distant, yet during the long weeks of their stay, Gottlieb had convinced himself that those lines were uncrossable. Like they had been set in stone by the universe itself, not by his own cowardice.

He could go up there. He _could._

He didn’t.

Instead, Gottlieb wrote long, dry essays for scientific journals in the city. He scribbled long and meaningless strings of numbers on breakfast napkins. Once, bored out of his mind, he disassembled several kitchen appliances and reconstituted them into a homemade radio.

Unfortunately, the new instrument did not work very well. No matter how Gottlieb tuned it, he heard only static, and the occasional garbled slur. He caught snatches of a crisp, acidic voice sometimes, or a bar of a song in the enemy’s language, before the signal fell back into static once again. It was better to have the radio off.

Gottlieb could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Geiszler in the past week. On Sunday he’d dragged himself downstairs, drained a bottle of nearly-sour milk in three swallows, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and slunk back upstairs again. Later, on Tuesday, Gottlieb had been woken up in the early hours of the morning by Geiszler dragging his steamer trunk slowly down the stairs.

The cottage was empty. Gottlieb worried that Geiszler might move into it, now that Hansen was gone, but Geiszler showed no signs of wishing to vacate. Gottlieb was all the happier for it. He wasn’t sure if he could withstand the mortification of knocking on Geiszler’s door and asking to use the lavatory.

There was a storm on the way.

Gottlieb knew that it would hit them hard. The clouds were black and sticky-looking, clumped together on the distant horizon like the kind of fat, sludgy mushrooms that grow in the bodies of dead animals. The sea looked rougher, more agitated, and it whipped the sand like it hated it. No rain yet, but it would come. Gottlieb could tell by the way his joints ached in the morning.

He didn’t like to think of what might happen when the storm hit. The only way back to town was to walk, and Gottlieb couldn’t make the trek even in fair weather. He had food- enough of it, at least, for a week or so. Maybe longer, if Geiszler continued to eat less and less with each passing day.

Geiszler came downstairs one evening dressed to the nines, with his coat buttoned up to the throat as usual and his hat already on and tilted low. Gottlieb stared as Geiszler brushed past him on the way out the door.

“There’s a storm coming,” Gottlieb said dumbly.

Geiszler hesitated on the thresh hold. The door was half ajar already and Gottlieb could smell the cloying air.

“I’m going out,” said Geiszler, in a smart little voice. “Don’t try to stop me.”

Gottlieb stared. _Don’t try to stop me? _What a thing to say.

“I . . . wasn’t,” he said, haltingly. “I only meant that you should be careful. If the rain hits while you’re out then you’ll have a terrible walk back up to the house.”

“Oh,” said Geiszler. “Right.”

He looked good- he’d shaved, and he’d ironed his shirt- but he didn’t look _well._ He seemed pale, even paler than usual. One hand was on the doorknob and one hung loose at his side, closing and unclosing.

“Where are you going, anyway?” asked Gottlieb, hoping to keep Geiszler talking as long as he had him here.

Geiszler’s eye twitched again. Then he turned around, spread both arms wide. “I’m just going out, alright? Going to see friends.”

“Friends,” Gottlieb repeated.

“Yes.”

“All your many, many friends.”

Geiszler’s smile looked strained. “Is that so very hard to believe?”

“Yes,” said Gottlieb.

Geiszler said nothing. His posture shifted- he looked like he wanted to sit down. Gottlieb would’ve liked that. If Geiszler would’ve just slumped at the kitchen table like he used to, talking about nothing at all while Gottlieb bustled around making tea, then the day would’ve felt almost normal.

Geiszler didn’t sit, but Gottlieb could tell that he wanted to.

Instead he sighed bitterly and cricked his neck from side to side. “I have friends all over, H———. I take care of them and they take care of me, you understand?”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” Gottlieb said drily. Then his expression softened. “I’ll admit,” he added, very quietly, almost as an afterthought, “that I consider one friend to be more than enough.”

He was looking at Geiszler when he said it. Geiszler was looking at the ceiling, and smiling.

“Yes,” he said. “One friend in all the world.”

The storm hit them hard, just like Gottlieb predicted it would.

I know how you are when there’s a storm outside, little one. Even now, thunder still makes you shrink back into your blankets. Gottlieb was much the same. He knew as well as you do that thunder is nothing to be afraid of, but it unnerved him nonetheless. It put him in mind of monsters, unfathomably vast, moving slow and unseen beyond the horizon.

He thought of those monsters often as he watched the rain lash the windows. The storm grew worse as days went by and Gottlieb’s thoughts grew wilder, more fanciful. He felt an overwhelming sense of unease, a feeling which was worsened by the smaller and smaller meals he ate to make the food last longer.

The storm kept him- and Geiszler- trapped in the lighthouse for a very long time. Gottlieb began to wonder if there was something in the world beyond the perception of ordinary men. He didn’t see Geiszler anymore. Not even for meals, or a late-night chat at the icebox.

Sometimes Gottlieb would find himself tossing and turning at night, kept up by the disruptive sounds of loud parties upstairs. He could hear dancing feet creaking the floorboards, the clinking of glasses, the joyful crackling of gramophone music.

No one ever visited the lighthouse, but Gottlieb could’ve sworn he heard ten, twenty people up there at least.

He never saw them leave.

Gottlieb met every morning exhausted and yearning for sleep, but he dressed himself nonetheless on the off-chance that Geiszler might come downstairs. He spread his charts and schematics across the kitchen table for posterity’s sake and spent his days smoking and watching the rain. He called this _working._

He was hard at work when he heard the first knock.

Gottlieb stilled. He waited for a second knock, to be sure that he hadn’t imagined it. Sure enough, he heard a second, louder knock a moment later.

In all this time, the lighthouse had never had so much as a single guest. Gottlieb hadn’t heard an automobile pull up, and moreover, he found it unlikely that anyone would hike all the way from town in this weather. Nonetheless, a third, more insistent knock demanded his attention. It would be downright cruel to leave a guest outside in this tempest, no matter how uninvited.

Gottlieb tapped out his cigarette on the windowsill and swallowed hard. “Hello?” he said cautiously. “Who are you?”

There was a moment of silence. Then, “Who is that? Dr. Jorden?”

“Harper,” said Gottlieb automatically. He crossed the room and opened the door.

There was a tall man standing on the doorstep, dressed in a soaking wet coat and boots. He was young, and handsome. Broad-shouldered like Gottlieb’s brother had been. He had a heavy forehead and a good mouth and a lot of closely-shorn blond hair.

“Can I help you?” Gottlieb said, bewildered.

The young man looked at the ground, his jaw set as though embarrassed to be seen here at all. “I figured . . . the storm must’ve hit you hard,” he said. “Thought I’d come around and see if my old man needed anything from town. Food, maybe. He doesn’t get out much.”

“Your . . . old man,” said Gottlieb, very quietly.

“He might not have mentioned me,” said the young man. He offered his hand. “My name is Charles Hansen. I’m his son.”

Gottlieb began to feel very cold.

“No,” he said, feeling vaguely light-headed. “We don’t need anything, thank you.”

“Are you sure? Listen, I know me and him aren’t on the best of terms, but I figured . . . I figured it was worth coming up here anyway.”

Gottlieb’s chest felt tight. He found it rather difficult to breathe. “Did you walk here?” he said hoarsely.

Charles nodded. Gottlieb looked at the steep dirt drive leading up to the lighthouse, now swamped with mud and loose gravel. Charles had pressed a trail of inch-deep bootprints into the mud all the way up the hill.

Gottlieb realized that he was smiling. Bright and broad, like he hadn’t smiled in a long time. “We’re fine up here, Mr. Hansen. You go on home.”

Charles looked a bit put out. “Listen, if he doesn’t want to talk to me . . .”

“He doesn’t,” said Gottlieb. He could feel a hysterical laugh locked up inside his chest, threatening to choke him. “He doesn’t want to talk to you. Now _go home._”

The _look_ that boy gave him. Like he was angry. Like he was _hurt_.

Gottlieb shut the door on his face and couldn’t breathe for laughing.

He didn’t stop for a very long time.

The rain whipped down harder, beating a brutal rhythm against the walls and windows. It sounded like a child banging on a pot with a spoon. The sound rang in Gottlieb’s ears.

A little voice in his head said,_ don’t go up there_.

Another little voice said, _you must_.

The first step was hard. The second step was easier. The third, fourth, and fifth followed, and they were painful, but Gottlieb had long since gone numb to the world and he continued to climb.

He thought of the way Dr. Geiszler had looked at him on their first late evening, his eyes shining with a kind of mocking interest that softened as the days went by. He thought of his hands, calloused by bone saws. He thought of their letters, before all of this began, and the way those first few lines- _My dear Dr. Gottlieb_\- made his heart leap in his chest.

He thought of Dr. Geiszler dragging his steamer trunk down the stairs. _Thump. Thump. Thump._

He kept walking.

Gottlieb passed several small, narrow windows as he climbed, each showing him a glimpse of the rain reflecting the lighthouse’s beacon. The light pulsed in sequence, bright and fast. He knew it was not the same signal Hansen had used.

What was it Geiszler said? About how every signal was distinct? How a unique combination of lights could signal a distant vessel, telling them everything there was to know about a place, and how to get there . . .

The stairs were wet, and Gottlieb walked slower. Every step caused a stabbing pain in his knees, as though someone were working a thin blade under the caps.

He could see the ceiling now, and the place where the stairs continued past the second floor and curled up into the third. He could see the beacon’s light pulsing through the cracks in the floorboards, bright as the noonday sun.

Five more steps now. Four. Three. All at once Gottlieb remembered every story he’d ever been told about the October Country. Every whisper of Stygian shores and harvest moons and pumpkin kings. He could not think of a story that had ended well.

He reached the second floor. The final step creaked dangerously under his cane.

This floor was one large room, like the first. Unlike the first, it had several tall windows. If Gottlieb had looked through those windows, he would have seen a different sea, a different sky.

He did not look through the windows.

Instead he looked at Geiszler’s cot, which had not been slept in. He looked at the candles, burned down to squicks, that had accumulated in waxy lumps on every surface. Mostly he looked at the floor, and the seawater tracked across it, and the tall, grimy glass tank in the center of the room.

The water inside was cloudy and gray. Gottlieb couldn’t see through it but he didn’t need to- the smell enough was confirmation of what he already knew.

The thing on the beach. Geiszler had kept it.

_“Gott,”_ Gottlieb croaked. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand. The stench was far beyond what it had been before. He could see thick, clumpy strings of dried wax clinging to the floorboards, surrounding the tank in a roughly five-pointed shape.

There was an old-fashioned washbasin by the far wall. Geiszler was standing there with his back to the staircase, half-dressed. He turned when he heard Gottlieb’s cane clatter to the ground.

“What do you think, H———?” he said, holding up two ties for Gottlieb’s inspection. “Light blue or dark?”

This was the first time Gottlieb saw Geiszler’s bare skin.

His body was blue with ink and charcoal, incomprehensible pictographs of insect-animals and blind-eyed fish demons jostling for space on his pale skin. Monsters bared their black teeth, eyes rolling, tongues lolling. Strange languages that tied the tongue and broke the jaw spread cancerously down Geiszler’s arms in messy, inky lines of occult symbology. Some of them looked old. Some of them looked new, and raw.

Gottlieb felt dizzy. Something flickered outside the window, something dark, but he did not see it. “How can you bear it?” he croaked.

He meant the stench of the fish-corpse in the tank. Geiszler must have known it, because he let the ties drop. He looked tired, and a little annoyed. “I was a naval surgeon,” he reminded Gottlieb, in a brittle, nasty little voice. “I severed enough limbs to stand ankle-deep in them. I got used to the stench.”

“I,” said Gottlieb. He swayed on his feet. “I. I climbed all the way up here. I came . . . I came here, for you.”

“Well, good for you,” sneered Geiszler. “Are you Childe Roland? Is this your dark tower?”

“I came because you killed him,” Gottlieb said. It slipped from his mouth in a moment of helpless desperation. “You killed Hansen.”

Geiszler’s expression, once bitter, relaxed into placid coldness. “I needed the lighthouse,” he said.

_The lights have changed, _Gottlieb thought. He felt paralyzed, frozen by fear. Fear for himself. Fear for Geiszler. Fear for what Geiszler had become.

_He changed the sequence. Why?_

_What is he calling?_

Gottlieb swallowed. He held up his hands in what he hoped was a placating gesture. “We are both men of science,” he said. “That ought to be enough to transcend any imagined lines between us. Whatever this is, whatever you’ve done . . . I want to help you. It’s you and I, against all of them. You know that.”

“You and I.”

Geiszler’s voice cracked on the word. For a moment he looked very sick and very small, as though Geiszler’s eyes looked out from behind a strange and unfamiliar face. Gottlieb could see the madness rattling around inside him. Then the moment passed, and Geiszler once again carried himself with cool precision.

Geiszler stepped forward. Gottlieb stepped back.

They were at the head of the staircase now, with Gottlieb’s back an inch from the wall. “You and I,” said Geiszler. He touched his hand to Gottlieb’s chest and it felt like being punched. “Down there. Drifting in the water.”

His hand smoothed down Gottlieb’s tie. Then Geiszler wrapped it slowly around his fist.

“The water looks different up here,” he said. “You gotta see it, H———. You can see the October Country from here. Moving in the water. Like Dagon. _Like Dagon._”

Gottlieb gripped Geiszler’s wrist, kept him from pulling. “Impossible,” he said.

“Is it impossible?” hissed Geiszler. His voice was a frantic whisper now. _“Is it? _It’s not laudanum this time. I can see it. I can . . . it can . . .”

His head dropped forward. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and manic.

“The things it whispers to me, H———,” he croaked. “The things it makes me feel. It . . . it won’t let me _sleep._ Used to be only laudanum made me see it . . . the October Country . . . but now I see it everywhere . . .”

He gripped Gottlieb’s tie tighter. The fragile, rotting thing Geiszler had found on the shore floated serenely in its tank. It looked quite dead.

Geiszler lifted his head and looked Gottlieb full in the face.

It was then, I think, that Gottlieb knew. The thing behind Geiszler’s eyes, the thing that moved his mind and body, the thing that killed Hansen- that wasn’t Dr. Geiszler. That wasn’t the same man Gottlieb had known at all.

The thing that wasn’t Geiszler looked at Gottlieb with shrewd eyes in a pale face. The hand gripping Gottlieb’s tie moved to grip his throat. They wobbled, locked together at the top of the staircase in some ugly parody of dance.

Gottlieb wanted to wake up. He didn’t care where. He could wake up and be back in the trenches- that was fine. That would do. Let the world end.

“You’re a good man,” he croaked. His hands scrabbled at Geiszler’s wrists, trying to loosen his grip. “Whatever has you . . . whatever has you . . .”

Lightning flickered outside. Gottlieb saw, for the briefest of moments, that the lightning had illuminated the skeletons of the clouds in sharp silhouette against the gray sky. Vast, weightless black skeletons, like the carcasses of beached whales.

“You’re strong enough to fight this,” Gottlieb pleaded.

“He is not strong enough,” sneered the cold and cruel October thing that lived inside Geiszler. His hand squeezed tighter. He was throttling him now, choking off Gottlieb’s oxygen. Gottlieb was going to die.

“Please,” said Gottlieb with desperation. “You’re my _friend._”

It was then that Geiszler’s demeanor shifted.

There was a moment- just the one- when the creature’s hold on him seemed to break. When, for a moment, his eyes changed, and Gottlieb saw _him_. There beneath it all. Hidden, but alive.

And he looked at Gottlieb like Gottlieb was the last thing he wanted to see before he died.

And he said, _“Surely there’s only so far I can go. Please, god, let there be only so far I can go.”_

And his grip eased slightly on Gottlieb’s throat.

And Gottlieb acted.

It seemed like a lifetime ago now, when Gottlieb had endured that nightmare.

He remembered it as clearly as he remembered Hansen’s face. He’d dreamed of water pressure, and light, and darkness.

He’d dreamed of a sound.

A dull and distant thump, followed by another, and another. Louder and closer, until it had been right next to his ear. Then a crack. Then silence.

He thought he had dreamed it.

He knew now what had become of Hansen.

Geiszler lost his grip easily when Gottlieb pushed him back. His hands clawed at the air. He reeled. His foot moved backward and found nothing, and his weight did the rest.

He fell hard, and fast.

Gottlieb stood, white-faced and frozen with shock, listening to the sound of Geiszler’s body crashing down, down, down. He listened with a sickly feeling of suspense. When the crack finally came, it sounded muted and wet.

Hansen would have ended up right next to the door. Gottlieb would’ve seen him, had it not been for the curtains around the bed.

_I think I’m going to throw up, _thought Gottlieb, with the kind of dispassionate distance that comes of profound shock. He did not throw up.

Numbly, he turned to face the windows. Darkness was spreading outside. He walked closer, close enough to open one of them and lean out, and there, _there-_

He could see it! There in the water, rising to meet him, following the beacon of Hansen’s- no, Geiszler’s- lighthouse! A vast and unholy thing, many-eyed and gibbous, dredging its inky mass up from the depths of the October Country!

Suddenly, Gottlieb was aware of how very tall the lighthouse was. Vertigo consumed his vision, made him dangerously unbalanced as he lurched away from the window, clutching for support from the bed, the washbasin, the tank at the center of the room.

The thing . . . Dagon, perhaps, or something worse . . . was coming. It was coming _here_, and the thing that wasn’t Geiszler had called it.

There was only one thing left to do.

Gottlieb had to destroy it.

From the bottom of the staircase, he heard a feeble sound. Then another, and the sound of something being dragged across the floor.

It sounded like this: _Thump. Schhh._

And again. Louder this time, and closer. _Thump. Schhh._

A wild and nervous laugh escaped Gottlieb’s throat. In that moment, he sounded very like Dr. Geiszler.

He lurched towards the stairs and began to climb them, up towards the third floor, where the beacon shined its ghoulish light. He gripped the railing tight and tried to steady himself on it, but he was too panicked, too desperate. Gottlieb took a step too fast and his leg went out from under him. He fell forward and struck his shoulder on the edge of one of the steps, and had to cling with both hands to keep from sliding down. He sobbed.

Below him, he heard that sound again. That heavy thump, that rasp of skin on wood. He didn’t want to look behind him. He looked anyway.

The staircase went down and down, past the second floor and into the first. The steps dipped into shadow where they turned the corner, hiding the rest of the stairs from Gottlieb’s view. Still the rasping sound of a body being dragged. Still the sound of fingernails scratching on aging steps.

Gottlieb dragged himself up the stairs too, every step an agony. The wood threatened to put splinters in his hands. Outside, he imagined he could hear the sound of that sacred Dagon, that ancient October beast, swimming up from the dirtyblackbrown undersea trenches with jelly-like eyes searching, searching, searching for the light . . .

. . . and if Gottlieb could turn that light _off _. . .

_. . . if he could just turn that blasted light off . . ._

The wind and rain bit into him hard when he reached the top floor. He hadn’t known that anything could be so cold, so unpleasant.

The walkway curved around a beacon of glass and the light inside it was blinding. Gottlieb couldn’t look at it directly. The sea stretched out in impossible directions all around. Gottlieb saw no beach, no cliff, no shore. The tower rose up from the black water and Gottlieb felt completely, utterly alone.

_Thump. Schhh. Thump. Schhh._

Behind him, the noise grew louder. Gottlieb dragged himself to his feet, feeling more dead than alive. He knew that if he looked behind him, he would see Geiszler looking up at him from the bottom of the steps. His face smeared with blood. His neck twisted, his head broken in.

Gottlieb couldn’t think about that. Not now.

Here in the October Country- for he knew now that that was where he was, perhaps where he had always been- he was alone. Geiszler was not strong enough. Gottlieb would have to be strong enough for both of them.

The beacon was sealed inside a glass compartment, and the switchboard was placed just inside the door. The door was open, swinging loosely on its metal hinges. Gottlieb all but hurled himself inside and stood bent over the switchboard, shaking, soaked to the skin with otherworldly rain.

The shadow in the water was bigger now, and rising fast. The beacon, blazing with light, threw Gottlieb’s silhouette into sharp relief as his hand found the shut-off switch. For a moment, the light looked like an enormous eye, with Gottlieb’s dark shape as its very pupil.

Geiszler dragged himself up the final step. “Don’t,” he choked, outstretching one broken-wristed hand. “They’ll kill you. I’m not worth that.”

Gottlieb breathed slowly, in and out.

He felt calm.

He flipped the switch.


End file.
